PARENT & CHILD

PARENT & CHILD; Halloween: A Big Boom In Boos

By CARIN RUBENSTEIN

Published: October 27, 1994

DAVID FOX, a financial analyst, began collecting recipes for edible dirt in his office at J. P. Morgan several weeks ago, part of his enthusiastic preparation for his daughter's Halloween party on Saturday.

Mr. Fox, 43, of Chappaqua, N.Y., plans to make his haunted basement spookier than ever for 9-year-old Emily and her friends, and also to render it "a more tactile experience," he said, which will include the eating of fake dirt.

Mr. Fox may also coerce a roomful of blindfolded children to feel a pile of peeled grapes, for a unique, eyeballish sensation; to squish their fingers in a vat of cold spaghetti and olive oil -- imitation intestines, and to plunge their hands into a mixture of Jello and pudding, just because it "really feels disgusting," Mr. Fox said.

The painstakingly planned party, an annual event, will be only part of the Fox family's Halloween celebration. With 3-year-old Katherine, they will also try to squeeze in the local Ragamuffin Parade on Saturday afternoon, a goblin-haunting Saturday evening in Gedney Park and two school parades and, of course, trick-or-treating on Monday night.

Halloween fanatics like the Fox family are as abundant as pumpkins in autumn.

Halloween has become, by some estimates, a $1.5 billion-a-year business, not including candy sales. It has its own trade shows and a yearly trade publication, aptly named "Selling Halloween." No longer just a day, Halloween is a season that begins early in October, when many families lavish their homes, both inside and out, with decorative Halloween displays that rival those for Christmas.

Halloween is also a community-centered holiday, when many towns sponsor children's costume parades. Schools, fire departments and community centers also host Halloween parties and costume contests; they were originally intended to replace trick-or-treating a decade or so ago because of widespread fears about sabotaged treats and the unsafe nature of trick-or-treating, but they have come to supplement the candy-gathering ritual that is at the heart of the holiday.

Indeed, 87 percent of children between ages 7 and 12 go trick-or-treating with an adult or with friends, as do 75 percent of children under 7, according to newly released figures from a random national survey on the Halloween habits of 985 adults, conducted by the Roper Starch polling organization in New York.

Mary Fox, 43, loves Halloween, she said, because it's "the last celebration of the outdoor season." It's also a time when people in the neighborhood reconnect after the summer. "The community is getting back together again," she said, adding that it's an ideal time for "reaching out."

Halloween is indeed one of the few community-building holidays in America today, much like our image of the pilgrims' first Thanksgiving, said Dr. Robert Wuthnow, a sociology professor at Princeton University and author of the new book "Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America's New Quest for Community" (Free Press).

"The whole community comes together for Halloween, building on earlier traditions of harvest festivals," Dr. Wuthnow said. "Thanksgiving is a family holiday, but Halloween is going out into the community. It's not a religious holiday." Unlike Christmas, nearly everyone can clebrate it. "I can remember feeling like more a part of the community than at any other time," Dr. Wuthnow added, referring to the years when his children were growing up. Even for city dwellers, community spirit comes alive during Halloween, and many high-rise apartment buildings become like small towns, at least for the few weeks before the holiday.

Cherie Spitzer, 43, a secretary with the New York City Board of Education, puts up a sign in the lobby of her 14-story building on East 18th Street in Manhattan every year, so that tenants who are Halloween-inclined can sign up to treat the building's trick-or-treaters, including her children, Eric, 11, and Leslie, 8. And the Spitzers' symbolic front yard, the outside of their apartment door, is covered with monsters and werewolves.

On Halloween, 10 to 20 children in the Spitzers' building and their parents trick-or-treat together. Everyone finishes at the apartment of the Sepulvedas, a couple Mrs. Spitzer knew until recently only as Shelley and Carlos, since Halloween night is the only time she socializes with them. Although their grown children no longer live at home, the Sepulvedas decorate their apartment "like the Addams family mansion" every year, Mrs. Spitzer said, and they graciously serve dinner to all the trick-or-treaters and parents.

Many city children never leave their building to trick-or-treat, for obvious safety reasons. But safety concerns guide trick-or-treaters everywhere, even in places like West Bend, Wis., a small town 35 miles northwest of Milwaukee.

Mary Beth Bales, 34, of West Bend, said that to protect the children, many nearby towns, along with hers, permit trick-or-treating only between 1 and 3 P.M. on the Sunday before Halloween.

Every year, on the weekend before Halloween, Mrs. Bales and her husband, John, drive with their daughters, Elizabeth, 11, and Abby, 9, from their house in the countryside to downtown West Bend to trick-or-treat with several other families there. The children are accompanied by their fathers, who chaperone with radio headphones tuned to the Green Bay Packers' football game. Afterward, they all go to one family's home for an early potluck supper.